The Toronto Star stood out like Doug Ford speaking without cue cards at a Mensa Convention this week when it temporarily deplatformed the hyperbolic Trudeau-China election “interference” story and instead opted to highlight a major climate change report.

For corporate news editors pretty much everywhere else in Canada, however, the projections of scientists and politicians from 195 countries weren’t hellacious enough to warrant boldface headlines.

The Star’s front page reporting brought into sharp focus the daily weather calamities already dominating news as a result of extreme climate and its effects on ecosystems.

Other bought media however tapped the mute button on a story that raises the spectre of a 2.8°C boost in the planet’s temperature by the year 2100.

The Globe and Mail tossed out a bland outline that read more like Coles Notes than a full-fledged effort at news reporting.

A public conditioned to scientific forecasts of 1.0°C to 1.5°C warming didn’t get the memo on the new temperature ceiling, likely by design and malice aforethought on the part of the Thomson Paper Formerly Known as Canada’s Newspaper of Record.

The narrative from the Conservative-aligned media wretches was that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) data synthesis was a dull rerun, like yesterday’s heat-trapping CO² emissions settling into the upper atmosphere.

If nothing else, it is proof that the corporate press still doesn’t get the environment beat. That very little improves on the greenhouse gas prevention front is the damn point of the IPCC analysis but, regrettably, it is a concept above and beyond the media’s pay grade.

The continued livability of the planet is predicated on the halting of a fast-moving countdown clock that means no news is bad news — for all of us — but click-bait journalists aren’t much interested.

IT USED TO NEVER RAIN IN CALIFORNIA

The IPCC red flag forecasts a world of more tornadoes in sunny Southern California, as occurred this week, and more heatwaves in the High Arctic, as occurred this month, unless wholesale cuts to greenhouse gas emissions are decreed by regulators.

Fortunately, the Star took a break from reporting florid rumours of foreign political influence peddling to push the heatwave story, unlike the majority of an MSM casting doubts on federal election results where unspecified aid allegedly helped elect an unspecified number of Liberals to a 160 to 119 pasting of the Tories in September 2021, a long 18 months ago.

Seems the Star hasn’t shed its progressive principles, just yet, while the Conservatives and their Libertarian allies in the press continue to embrace Trump-level election denial and psychological projection about campaign financing from dodgy sources.

The most powerful environmental assessment of the decade by IPCC panelists castigates the planet’s property managers, humanity, while it offers a vision of climate change consequences even more disastrous than those already revealed in recent deadly weather tragedies.

May it not be your misfortune to live in interesting times would seem to be the general theme of the document.

CLIMATE STORY FAILS TO CRACK PAGE ONE

Nevertheless, the IPCC report confoundingly failed to generate much front page heat in that great mass of discernment and shrewdness known as the Canadian mainstream media.

“You wouldn’t know the IPCC’s most important climate report in a decade happened yesterday, if you only read Canadian media webpages,” former chief of staff for PM Justin Trudeau, Gerald Butts, posted on Twitter.

“They’re debating whether to indict their former president [Trump] here in New York and they still managed to put climate above the fold in the New York Times.”

INSUFFICIENT FUNDS IS A FEATURE

“Accelerated climate action will only come about if there is a many-fold increase in finance. Insufficient and misaligned finance is holding back progress,” the report said.

The wonks who worked up that idea could have been speaking directly to the negligent stewards of Ontario’s environment, the Stubborn Conservatives of Doug Ford.

Ford’s Bill 197, the Covid-19 Economic Recovery Act that eliminates many environmental reviews and retroactively exempts Ford from having to consult stakeholders about future changes to the Environmental Assessment Act, is one of many ecological landmines the regime has laid, in concert with its threats to encroach on the Greenbelt and the Niagara Escarpment.

TORSTAR FOCUSED ON TODAY’S YOUTH

The Star’s coverage emphasized the micro view, casting forward to a rapidly approaching 2030 and the plight of the planet from the perspective of a typical 10-year-old Ontario primary school student worried about the state of the environment in 2023 and what she will face as a 37-year-old woman in 2050:

“There’s a girl sitting in a Grade 5 class today. By the time she graduates from high school, in just seven years, the decisions the world makes around carbon emissions will determine the environment she grows up in.”

The theme of reporter as eyewitness to the planet’s downfall is written from the perspective of an observer in the thick of things, reviewing an ever more troubling present.

The underlying message of the story was a window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all was closing.

But let’s pan to an alternate point of view, same province, POV The Premier.

“There’s a 58-year-old premier sitting somewhere other than Queen’s Park today, possibly at his Muskoka cottage.

“By the time he completes his current term in 2026, in just three years, the decisions this premier makes around carbon emissions and greenhouse gases and land use will determine the environment Dougie the Snowmobiler grows old in.

“Should he win yet another term of office, scientists warn a Western jurisdiction such as Southern Ontario will have to slash carbon emissions by almost half to prevent Premier Ford from living out his old age in a province with increased floods, fires, crop failures, forced migration, infectious disease outbreaks and a diminished snow pack.”

Indeed, the prospect of slushy snowmobile trails up in El Rancho Grande, the Ford Family Compact Compound in Muskoka, is daunting.

If only Ford was a progressive premier focused on the future, and not determined to run a racket, perhaps he would not be promoting homes on the undeveloped Greenbelt.

Meantime, developed Toronto has approved plans for more than 19,700 affordable rentals over the last six-plus years, but 92 per cent remain in the planning pipeline, incomplete, as rising interest rates mean all kinds of housing projects have hit roadblocks, potential returns on investment becoming slimmer.

Ford should be legislating and/or promoting the following:

• That companies find a way to make working from home a permanent gig for the majority of their employees;

• Should the above fail to take root on a voluntary basis, make it mandatory for employers to adapt to the new climate reality and eliminate their need for middle-management staff to “micro-manage” their minions in person. It is all hands on deck at this point;

• Absolutely refuse to allow any development on sensitive areas like the Greenbelt and the Niagara Escarpment, as they are far too important to the climate and must be preserved;

• Encourage the workforce to look to relocating to mid-sized cities like Barrie, Orillia, Cambridge, Kitchener, London, etc., given telecommuting makes distance a non-factor;

• Issue grants or loans to owners of large downtown commercial high-rise towers to convert them into housing units.

Thing is, with Doug, his focus is predominantly on which friends and associates in Ontario’s elites will benefit from government initiatives.

Like the healthcare corporations profiting from private surgeries, no doubt land speculators are lining up at Queen’s Park to lobby for housing tracts, highways and gas stations on the Greenbelt, and more gravel pits and water-hogging golf courses on the Escarpment.

Previous reports established 1.5°C of warming as a critical ceiling. Blasting past that, and particularly past 2°C, will have catastrophic consequences for people and the planet, and could trigger irreversible tipping points that make the Earth far less livable, the report warned. Unfortunately, few were told about it.

(Feature photo courtesy Shutterstock)

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